Tour Championship Each-Way Tips: Im can go low at East Lake

Main Bet: Sungjae Im each-way for Lowest 72 Hole Score @ 23.022/1

Our 100/1 pick Scott Stallings was two clear on the back nine at last week's BMW Championship.

Had he held on, a trying year would have turned into another profitable one but golf is all about fine margins and they didn't quite go his or our way over the final couple of holes.

It is what it is. We go again. And other cliches.

So, a genuinely weird season comes to an end, as usual, at East Lake in Georgia where a 30-man field chase an eyewatering jackpot, the winner banking $18m.

However, with LIV on the scene, that prize fund somehow looks ordinary. After all, Henrik Stenson banked $4.375m for winning some knockabout LIV event at Trump National, a nice top-up for his reported $40m signing-on fee.

It would be nice to think that prestige still counted most for each and every of the 30 qualifiers for East Lake: after all, they've played some great golf in competitive fields to get there.

But when it's all over on Sunday night, some will no doubt reveal in the coming days that sporting glory is second fiddle compared to getting their hands on a load more wonga elsewhere.

Anyway, back to the task in hand which, somewhat unfortunately, also deals in muddied waters for punters due to the staggered start.

In one sense, giving the guy at the top of the standings (Scottie Scheffler) a head start seems a fair reward for his sustained excellence.

But the counter-argument is that it vastly reduces the chances of everyone else, thus reducing this basically to a shootout between the players near the top of the standings.

Last year, Patrick Cantlay went in as leader (-10) and coasted his way to the finishing line. A dramatic conclusion it was not.

The starting grid for the 2022 edition looks like this:

-10 Scottie Scheffler
-8 Patrick Cantlay
-7 Will Zalatoris
-6 Xander Schauffele
-5 Sam Burns
-4 Cameron Smith, Rory McIlroy, Tony Finau, Sepp Straka, Sungjae Im
-3 Jon Rahm, Scott Stallings, Justin Thomas, Cameron Young, Matt Fitzpatrick
-2 Max Homa, Hideki Matsuyama, Jordan Spieth, Joaquin Niemann, Viktor Hovland
-1 Collin Morikawa, Billy Horschel, Tom Hoge, Corey Conners, Brian Harman
E KH Lee, JT Poston, Sahith Theegala, Adam Scott, Aaron Wise

The good news is that punters are offered an alternative market to the basic 'who will win the FedEx Cup' offering.

That comes in the form of the Lowest 72-Hole Score (Excluding Handicap). In other words, who actually takes fewest strokes. It's hugely unlikely that Jordan Spieth could win from eight back at start of play but he could shoot the lowest 72-hole score.

That's reflected in his price for those two contrasting markets: 66/1 and 25/1.

One line of thinking is that players way back could sneakily emerge with the lowest 72-hole score as they don't carry any of the pressures of those at the top.

Such a theory is backed up by Kevin Na sharing top spot in that market 12 months ago. Na started at -2 and despite his excellent scoring he was still seven behind Cantlay on the main FedEx Cup leaderboard going into the final round so could freewheel to a large extent.

Another player at -2, Xander Schauffele, finished third in the 72-Hole market while Jon Rahm, who matched Na's 14-under total, had started the week in fourth place at -6.

A second angle can be found by looking at correlating courses and colleague Steve Rawlings really drills down on the link between East Lake and another Donald Ross design, Sedgefield.

And I'm going to play on that by picking three players with strong form in the Wyndham Championship.

Note, all my bets are in the Lowest 72 Hole Score market which allows gives us far more room for manouevre.

Na, who shared honours with Rahm in that market 12 months ago, was coming in off a recent playoff loss at Sedgefield so again that correlation was really franked.

Last month, Sungjae Im finished tied second there, backing up previous good form in the Wyndham Championship of 24-9-6.

That was Im's second straight runners-up finish after a near-miss in the 3M Open and since his Sedgefield second he's kept his form going with 12th at the St Jude Championship and 15th in last week's BMW Championship.

Perhaps his East Lake 72-hole finishes of 15th, 12th and 23rd don't stand out given a field size of 30 but his 68-64 start in 2020 was the lowest 36-hole tally so it's a course he can score on.

Strokes Gained: Off The Tee has been a strong pointer down the years and Im ranks 9th in that category this season.

Bogey Avoidance has also been key and Im ranks 1st so the more we join the dots the more the face of Sungjae Im starts to appear.

Back him at 22/1 to shoot the lowest 72-hole score. (He's 25s to win the overall prize but it's a fair guess that he'd need to win our chosen market to do that.)

Next Best: Scott Stallings each-way for Lowest 72-Hole Score @ 51.050/1

After he gave us such a big run last week, I'm going to stick with Scott Stallings one more time.

He's 50/1 in the 72-hole market.

True, this is his course debut but he's playing superb golf at the moment and his second place at the BMW (on another course he hadn't seen before) represented a fourth top 10 in six starts.

I also like the positive angle he took despite just missing out on a first PGA Tour win since 2014.

"I was thrilled with the way I put myself in position after kind of a weird three-putt on 13, and I had a lot of good birdie looks coming in and a lot of really good shots coming down the stretch in a situation that I really hadn't been in to this level in a long time," he said last week.

"I was thrilled with the way I kind of handled it all.

"That [to qualify for the Tour Championship] was the biggest goal of the year.

"I had a very in-depth conversation with all the guys I work with in Napa, and to figure out what it was going to take, some tweaks in my game to do the things I need to do to play at this level, to compete with the best players in the world and make it to East Lake was better late than never, I guess.

"But super excited the way that John and I kind of handled ourselves and knew what we were doing with coming down the stretch, and excited for next week."

In terms of being a good fit for East Lake, Stallings made just four bogeys over the final 54 holes at Wilmington last week and he drove the ball well too.

As for that Sedgefield link, the American finished tied 13th there last month after closing 67-65.

At the start of last week, Stallings was 47th in the FedEx Cup rankings so to make it to the final 30 and achieve his pre-season and long-term goal was a massive boost.

History shows that Playoffs poster boys are a real thing - think Camilo Villegas and Billy Horschel - so following a player who nearly won the last event seems a legitimate idea.

Final Bet: Adam Scott each-way for Lowest 72-Hole Score @ 34.033/1

I had a brief look at JT Poston, a former Sedgefield winner who captured the John Deere Classic recently.

But all roads seem to lead to Adam Scott so I'll make the Aussie my last bet, again to shoot the lowest number over the four days of competition.

Starting with course form, Scott is a former Tour Championship winner (2006) and in the modern era he shot the fifth best 72-hole score on his last visit in 2019.

Basically, it's a course that really suits him and one he can thrive on when driving well.

That's the case right now as the 2013 Masters champion has finished 21st or better for SG: Off The Tee in three of his last four starts. He was 14th OTT in last week's BMW.

Speaking there, Scott was delighted to have scraped into East Lake after a brilliant up and down from sand at 18.

That gave him a second straight top five finish following his fifth place at the St Jude - another course (TPC Southwind) that has Zoysia fairways and Bermuda greens.

"This week I felt like I played really high-quality golf. I was out there with Scottie Scheffler yesterday who's obviously played incredible this year, and I felt like I was playing at that high, high level again," said Scott.

"I haven't been in so many of those situations this year. But I felt like my game stacked up, and I felt like a top player.

"Hopefully stuff to build on this week, and go for it next week with really nothing to lose and head into the next season full of confidence and hopefully keep my head in this place where I feel like I'm one of the best players out here."

As with Stallings, I'm hoping the thrill of making it (Scott has missed the last two editions) via a strong performance will prove an ideal recipe.

Scott ranked 7th for Bogey Avoidance last week and he was runner-up at Sedgfield in 2021.

As one of the five players starting in joint-last at Even par, he's too far back to win the FedEx Cup but Scott is capable of shooting the lowest 72-hole total.

In the actual winner of the FedEx Cup market, Xander Schauffele at 15/2 would probably be my idea of the best bet. He'll start at -6, four behind Scheffler.

But I'm kind of hoping Scheffler holds on. He would be a deserved winner after such an incredible season.